At this year’s World Economic Forum, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that the rupture of the old order offered a middle power opportunity. By working together and strengthening their capabilities, he argued, these countries could carve a path between the great states and preserve a tolerable system for themselves.




It’s an old dream. Since the 1970s, scholars and strategists have hoped that the world can have rules without rulers—that smaller states can somehow preserve the best parts of the U.S.-built order even after U.S. leadership is gone. It’s also an illusion. Order cannot be sustained absent the commitment—much less over the objections—of the mightiest actors. So the likeliest alternative to a new cold war or new age of empires is an anarchic mess.


In this scenario, the United States goes rogue: Trump’s darker impulses foretell the emergence of a brutish, norm-busting superpower. Washington engages in aggressive territorial expansion. It appropriates, through force or coercion, vital resources from weaker powers. It demands ever-greater tribute from dependencies; it interferes incessantly, on behalf of illiberal populists, in the politics of Europe and other regions. The United States weaponizes, not abandons, its global role.


This scenario is so dire because U.S. behavior creates a world in which all three of the great powers are grasping, rapacious revisionists. Smaller powers, especially along Eurasia’s fault lines of conflict, are in danger of being squeezed on several sides. Self-help—essentially, every nation for itself—is the only plausible response.


Territorial aggression, even the disappearance of states, becomes far more common because there is no great power committed to preserving the status quo or vindicating the sovereignty of weaker nations. A self-help world thus sees some vulnerable states smashed, subordinated, or vivisected. The war in Ukraine might be a preview of the future, rather than an ugly reminder of the past. Other states would arm themselves feverishly, perhaps seeking nuclear weapons as the best guarantee of survival.


Meanwhile, rivalries long smothered by U.S. power might reignite: If European states rearm while the European Union—perhaps under combined U.S. and Russian pressure—fractures, look out for a return of the arms races and security competitions that were once so common on that continent. Say goodbye to freedom of navigation: As international stability breaks down, countries and even quasi-state actors will scramble to control vital chokepoints, from the Panama Canal and Northern Sea Route to the Bab el-Mandeb and Strait of Hormuz. In a lawless world, physical control of trade, resources, and markets looms larger—which simply reinforces other motives for conquest.




This all sounds like a nightmare. But viewed through the lens of history, it’s not such a stretch.


The end of British hegemony in the early 1900s didn’t promptly usher in a new world. It unleashed decades of chaos. For centuries before the rise of British hegemony, a multipolar Europe—then the center of the international system—was a hothouse of tyranny and war.


Our belief that relative stability is the norm and rampant brutality the exception is the intellectual residue left by generations of benign U.S. hegemony. If that hegemony ends or turns predatory, get ready for a nasty relapse.


In fact, anarchy is never as fully suppressed as we think it is, and hints of a self-help world are already here. Fears about U.S. reliability are stimulating nuclear curiosity: Witness the interest of South Korea and Japan in obtaining nuclear-powered submarines or the nuclear armament debates that are intensifying even in Sweden and Germany. Worst-case planning is gaining currency. For the first time in generations, Canada is reportedly preparing to protect itself from U.S. invasion.


New defense partnerships are emerging, often creating new tensions. The Pakistan-Saudi Arabia defense pact signed last year has already inflamed Indian anxieties; it could aggravate Middle Eastern rivalry with Israel if Turkey joins. Rivalry is roiling key regions. The Persian Gulf, of course, has been awash in conflict. But the situation in Libya and across the Horn of Africa, where proxy wars rage as several powers chase resources and strategic real estate, may be a window into the multipolar disorder ahead.


That chaos wouldn’t last forever: Eventually, a new hierarchy with new rules would solidify. But it took a global economic depression and two world wars to bridge the interregnum between Pax Britannica and Pax Americana. Even if the world ultimately finds a new model of stability, it might also find that the soaring achievements of the post-1945 era have, in the intervening havoc, been undone.






Think of our moment as a crossroads—a point from which global politics can take one of several paths. The uncertainty is profound because the paths lead to very different destinations. What we already know is that the next era will be more divided and dangerous than the last.




A decade ago, another cold war seemed like a worst-case outcome. Now, it’s probably our best hope. A two-worlds scenario would see perilous crises and further fracture the global economy. Outcompeting a confident, combative China will require vast resources and acumen from the democratic bloc. But that scenario at least preserves “half a world,†as former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson once wrote; it entails sufficient democratic cooperation to sustain a tolerable balance of power and hold Beijing’s most ambitious impulses in check. The other scenarios—a new age of empires that proves far less stable and advantageous than advertised or a descent back into chaos—are uglier. Those paths may tempt a superpower that has largely forgotten just how awful the period that preceded Pax Americana was—but be assured, they end in darkness.


The irony is that the United States still gets an outsized say in what follows the order it created because—for better or worse—the choices of the world’s mightiest actor still matter the most. If the country channels Trump’s best policies, it might steer a reformed, if badly ruffled, democratic community toward the collective effort required to resist autocratic pressure. If, however, Washington pulls back from overseas theaters, it will invite a spheres-of-influence scramble. If the United States turns renegade, it will join the revisionists tearing down the old order and thrust the world into a new self-help era.




There are signs of all three tendencies in Trump’s eclectic foreign policy. The coming years—and U.S. electoral cycles—will determine which of those tendencies harden into patterns that become progressively more difficult to reverse.


Perhaps the lack of U.S. domestic support for seizing Greenland shows that Trump’s excesses will eventually discredit his wilder instincts. His successor, whether a Democrat or Republican, may find a way of marrying more traditional foreign-policy ideas to the domestic political realities of an America First era. That president could moderate Trump’s disruption while exploiting his more helpful legacies to rebuild the free world for a new cold war.


Alternatively, perhaps one of Trump’s military adventures backfires. In the aftermath, the neoisolationist wing of the MAGA movement—the part that takes its cues from pundits such as Tucker Carlson—triumphs, and a superpower hunkers down in its hemisphere. Or maybe Trump’s true successor, in the Republican Party and the presidency, will be someone who argues that he didn’t go far enough in using U.S. power to wreck the established order. It wouldn’t be the first time a revolution was eventually captured by its most radical elements.


The old order is dying: Eulogizing a globally minded, liberal international order won’t bring it back. The critical question, to be answered in the coming decade, is whether Washington tries to replace that world with something fraught but tolerable—or drives the present uncertainty toward something radically worse.



											
